


roll the dice (i've got your number)

by thistidalwave



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-10
Updated: 2012-11-10
Packaged: 2017-11-18 08:09:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thistidalwave/pseuds/thistidalwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Louis keeps bumping into Zayn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	roll the dice (i've got your number)

**Author's Note:**

> It's my birthday! ...so I wrote relatively self-indulgent fic. :D

When Louis first meets Zayn it’s at a club, the flashing of strobe lights obscuring her face, but she smells of cigarette smoke and her cheekbones feel sharp against the curve of Louis’ thumb, and her thighs are soft under her skirt, and they fall into each other easily, pressed up against the brick wall behind the club, and then Zayn is whispering _Come home with me_ into Louis’ ear, and, well, who is she to deny an offer like that?

Louis wakes up on a cold mattress in a very white room and is momentarily confused, but Zayn appears in the doorway almost immediately after, bearing the gift of tea.

She perches on the edge of the mattress and hands Louis a cup. It’s bona fide china, decorated with blue swirls, and Louis finds it strangely charming. 

“Good morning,” Zayn says softly.

“Morning,” Louis croaks out and then winces, coughing slightly before taking a sip of her tea.

Louis pulls her clothes on some ten minutes later, checks her hair in Zayn’s bathroom mirror to find that it’s a total mess and decide not to bother to fix it, and smacks a kiss to the corner of Zayn’s mouth before she leaves, as if they’re an actual domestic couple and Louis is just heading off for a day at work. Louis likes the irony of it, and she hums to herself all the way down the stairs of Zayn’s building.

 -

The second time they meet is in a supermarket, blazing fluorescent lights overhead. Louis is shopping with Niall, which is always an ordeal because Niall would just as soon take everything in the shop home with her and Louis has to dissuade her of all her random fancies, and Zayn is standing by a display of oranges, staring at them as though they’re a particularly difficult puzzle.

“They all taste about the same,” Louis says helpfully, standing beside Zayn, and Zayn looks up, startled. Her eyeliner is smeared around her eyes and she looks exhausted, but in a startlingly gorgeous way. Louis wants to wrap her up in her arms, pull her hair out of its ponytail so that it falls around her face, and kiss her over and over until her lips are bruised red. It’s kind of heavy thinking for two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of a Tesco.

“Suppose you’re right,” Zayn says. “Louis, right? From the other night?”

Louis watches as Zayn puts oranges into a plastic bag and ties it off before placing it in her basket. “That’s me. Louis.”

“Nice to see you again,” Zayn says, but it has a note of falsehood in it, no sincerity in her eyes. Louis tries to pretend it doesn’t matter.

“Likewise,” she says. “I’d better go before my flatmate tries to get six different kinds of crisps.”

She runs off before Zayn can reply, and when Niall asks where she’d got off to she just shrugs.

 -

Louis hasn’t been thinking of Zayn at all, really, except in the quiet moments when the way her eyelashes spread against her cheeks sticks in Louis’ mind, how her hair seems perpetually artfully mussed and there had been dried paint under her fingernails.

Liam thinks she should either give it up and stop talking to her about it, or go back to the club until she finds Zayn again and this time ask for her number all proper like and things. Louis thinks both those things sound like far too much effort.

It turns out she needn’t have worried--apparently the world has seen fit to shrink sometime in the past two weeks, and Zayn wanders into the record shop where Liam works. Louis is perched on the front counter even though Liam keeps telling her to get down, and she widens her eyes when she sees who it is.

“You meant _that_ Zayn?” Liam asks, catching on to her expression, and Louis frowns.

“There’s a _that_ Zayn?” 

“She comes in all the time,” Liam explains, watching Zayn flip through the D section of the R&B rack. “Sorry I didn’t say, I just didn’t make the connection.”

This time when Zayn sees Louis, she smiles almost immediately. Louis is taken aback by it. “Hi there, Louis,” Zayn says. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Um,” Louis says intelligently.

“Louis is my best friend,” Liam says, ringing up the albums Zayn pushes across the counter to her. “We met at uni.”

“Sweet,” Zayn says. She and Liam keep chatting for a few minutes, and Louis barely listens, too preoccupied with trying to figure out whether she should say something, maybe ask Zayn out, maybe blurt out that she can’t stop thinking about her, and damn, that jawline is sinful.

“Bye, Louis,” Zayn is saying. “I’ll see you around.” And then she winks, and Louis is pretty sure that if she’d been standing she would have fallen over.

“Yeah,” she manages. “Around.”

Liam gives her a knowing look the second Zayn is out of the shop. Louis smacks her over the head with pamphlet.

 -

“If you don’t work here,” Louis says, “why are you making my tea for me?”

Harry brushes her fringe out of her eyes and glares at Louis. “Because Ed’s on the phone in the back and you demanded tea immediately.”

Louis smiles sweetly and is rewarded with a scowl and a paper cup of tea. “Thanks, love,” she coos.

“Shut up and tell me about your latest crush,” Harry says. “Niall called and said you’ve been moping about the flat and refusing to go out to the pub with her.”

“Now that is just an absurd exaggeration,” Louis says, blowing on her tea. “I have been busy with schoolwork. I am a hard working graduate student.”

Harry eyes her. “Uh huh. Zayn’s her name?”

Louis sighs. She’s been friends with Harry long enough to know there’s no way she’s getting out of this. “Yes, but it’s a not a big deal. We hooked up once, we saw each other by chance two other times, whatever.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Harry says, rolling her eyes. “She’s about this tall? Long dark hair? Drop dead gorgeous?”

“Um, yes...?” 

“Zayn Malik,” Harry says with an air of finality, and Louis is confused. “I met her once at a gallery showing that Nick dragged me to. She’s quite the up and coming artist, from what I gathered. Bit strange, I thought, but all the best people are.”

“Oh,” Louis says, and then, “How the fuck do all of you know her?”

“Don’t make me start singing about how small a world it is,” Harry says, grinning. “You want her number?”

“You can’t just give me her number,” Louis protests.

“Sure I can,” Harry says. “Got it right here in my mobile.” She waves said device at Louis.

“No,” Louis says.

When she leaves the shop five minutes later, it’s with Zayn’s number in her phone and her tea soaked through the side of her t-shirt, sticking it to her skin.

 -

Louis is at the public library working on a huge paper due in two days because, despite Harry’s skepticism, she really _is_ a hard working graduate student, when someone comes up beside her, casting a shadow over her laptop keyboard.

“I’ll be here awhile, sorry,” Louis says without looking up.

“Hi, Louis,” a familiar voice says, and Louis nearly gives herself whiplash she looks up so fast. It’s Zayn, of course, looking strangely flawless, as if she’d been done up to go to a really nice dinner or something.

“Zayn,” Louis says. “What are you doing here?”

Zayn holds up a stack of books. “Comics are expensive for a starving artist, so I pay a library fee and make do with graphic novels.” She sits down across the table from Louis, settling in like she belongs there. “What are you working on?”

“A paper,” Louis says. “I study child psychology.”

“Oooh,” Zayn says. “At a graduate level? Does that mean you’re going to get to put doctor at the front of your name?”

Louis grins. “Yep. Doctor Tomlinson, at your service.”

Zayn eyes her speculatively. “At my service, hmmm?” she says. “Sounds hot. Almost as hot as how good you look in those glasses.”

Louis has never been one to balk at a blatant come on, nor has she ever been one for patience, so she’s pretty sure that’s exactly how she ends up coming down from an orgasm in the public toilets of the library, breathing heavily into Zayn’s neck and dragging her fingers idly down the inside of Zayn’s arm. “You should come to dinner,” she says.

“Dinner?”

“With me and the girls,” Louis clarifies. “We go out, like, every second Friday or thereabouts.”

“So tomorrow?”

Louis nods. “I can text you.”

“I’ll have to give you my number,” Zayn says, fumbling toward the pocket of her jeans.

“No, wait, here,” Louis says, stepping back to give Zayn room and doing up the fly of her own jeans before pulling her phone out of her pocket and bringing up the contacts.

She hands the mobile to Zayn and watches patiently as she swipes her fingers across the screen a couple times before frowning. “Um, why am I already in your phone?”

Louis laughs. “Oh, Harry already forced your number upon me.”

“Harry Styles?” Zayn asks. Louis nods. “Do I know all your friends?” Zayn asks, amused.

“I’m starting to think so,” Louis admits, and then presses a kiss to the side of Zayn’s mouth as she takes her phone back before stepping out of the cubicle because she likes the parallelism.

 -

Honestly, Louis can’t even be bothered to be surprised when Niall takes one look at Zayn the next night and immediately jumps up from her seat at the table to hug her. 

“I haven’t seen you in ages,” Niall says, but Louis catches her wink after, and Zayn glances awkwardly toward Louis. 

“We were friends for the first year of uni and then sort of drifted apart when I quit rowing crew,” Zayn explains. “I saw her the other night at the pub and she told me how to find you at the library.”

Niall pouts. “You were supposed to keep that a secret.”

“Sorry, Nialler,” Zayn says, ruffling Niall’s hair as they go to sit down. Niall bats her hand away. “Hi, Harry, Liam. Nice to see you again.”

“Likewise,” Harry says, smiling broadly across the table.

“What did you think of that last album you bought?” Liam asks, always eager to talk about music. 

Zayn’s face lights up. “It was amazing, Li, just as good as you said it would be.”

Liam grins. “Good, I knew you’d like it.”

The conversation is off to a fantastic start and only seems to get better from there, with everyone shooting curious questions at Zayn and Zayn answering easily before directing the question back at everyone else, and it kind of astounds Louis how easily she fits in. It’s always been her and Harry since college, and then Liam had joined their first year of uni, Niall when Louis had started graduate school, and they work so well as four that it seems weird that could still be space for five--but somehow there is. 

It occurs to Louis, sitting at the table in the same restaurant she’s been coming to with her friends for nearly three years now and watching them banter about what they want to order, Zayn fully in on the action, that she really wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. She grabs Zayn’s hand under the table on a whim, sliding their fingers together.

Zayn looks over at her. “What’s that for?” she asks, a smile ghosting at the edge of her mouth.

“Just really glad I kept meeting you, I think,” Louis says. 

“Bit like fate or something like that,” Zayn says. “There’s no way we wouldn’t have met eventually, seeing as I know all your friends.”

And Louis--Louis likes that, that maybe it wasn’t just chance that drew her to the mysterious girl in the leather jacket dancing by herself that night at the club, and she finds herself leaning in to kiss Zayn, slotting their lips together with her thumb on Zayn’s cheek to steady them.

“Oi, none of that at the table,” Harry protests, chucking a napkin in their direction while Niall catcalls and Liam giggles.

“Jealous, babe?” Louis asks, and Harry rolls her eyes. Zayn squeezes Louis’ fingers, and it feels like the beginning of something.


End file.
